Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Vegan Blue Cheese Recipe

Since my
Melomeals blog was hacked recently, I have thought long and hard about what I
want to do with my content.

Over the
years, I have freely given away several cookbooks worth of recipes; which was
great, because I love creating flavorful plant-based food and sharing it with
people.

Most of my
content is backed up, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple to access. Some recipes
are on disk, many have been salvaged from several computers that crashed and
now live on The Boyfriend’s external server.

I was
notoriously not very organized with my files, so recipes and pictures are all
over the place. I recently had to reinstall my OS (after the situation with my
blog) and have created a strict system for myselfso I can organize my files in a more logical sense.

Every single
day, I get numerous requests for recipes. I have spent a lot of time digging
for recipes and copying them for people, but I realized that it is taking too
much of my time to respond to every request.

I have
decided I will start offering customized E-Books. I am going to spend the next
several weeks creating a recipe directory so people can pick and choose:

·5 recipes for $10

·10 recipes for $15

·20 recipes for $30.

I will also
offer customized recipes. The price for this service will be determined by the
recipe.

I know I
have played around with E-book ideas for a while, and I have actually written
the content, but I just can’t justify selling them for the small amount of money
that people are charging for E-books.

I value my
time and creativity too much to do that.

I think that
we are doing each other a disservice by giving away content for free or nearly
free because everyone else is and it has become expected.

I want to
enjoy blogging again, because I do love creating amazing food. I love talking
about it, writing about it and photographing it!

I haven’t
felt enjoyment for a long time, and I will touch more on that in future
writings as I reclaim this blog for myself.

There seems
to have been a slow descent into insanity online, and every post, no matter what
I content I put forward was subject to judgment, scrutiny and more importantly,
I have noticed a very disturbing trend towards Orthorexia within the online
food blogging community. This concerns me greatly and I do not want to be
associated with any of that.

So, from
this day forward, this blog is going to be my home.I have never really felt comfortable
expressing my opinions and writing authentically because of the backlash, but
that stops today.

I may write
about the meal I lovingly prepared for my boyfriend which contains meat. I do
it as an act of service because I love him dearly and it makes me so happy to
take care of him. (I don’t eat meat and never will.)

I will
probably talk more about the methods I use to create food and the food itself
instead of writing recipes. I don’t cook that way. I just create, so stopping
to write recipes constantly takes the joy out of it for me. It makes it feel
like a job, and if I’m going to “work”, then I’m going to get paid.

This doesn’t
mean I won’t ever post recipes, but I certainly am not going to post recipes
for everything I want to talk about!

I am also
going to write quite a bit about my opinions on food and health related matters,
because they have been a very important factor in my life and I have had to
come to terms with a lot of brainwashing regarding food and health.

I realize
this will alienate many of you, but I’m OK with that. There are thousands of
blogs out there to choose from.

When my blog
was hacked recently, I completely broke down. YEARS of my work were gone.

HOURS. UPON HOURS. UPON HOURS.

Do you have
idea how much time, money and creative passion went into Melomeals? Probably
not, especially if you are just stopping by for a recipe you pinned.

To have it
just taken away like that made me feel like the last 8 YEARS of my creative and
frankly, my PROFESSIONAL life (It was really the best online resume to showcase
my cooking style!) was stolen from me.

It almost
broke me. It didn’t help that it was just after my second foot surgery in a
year. The last 2 years of my life has been extremely difficult, and everything I
loved doing both socially and professionally has been compromised and
diminished due to health problems.

I am now,
finally, on the road to recovery. The last foot surgery I had, has fixed my
foot, but I still have months of recovery to go before I can hopefully work on
my feet again full time.

I now see things
in a new light. This is a turning point for me and it has made me very clear on
my feelings. For those of you still with me,

28 comments:

The comment system is broken and I have lost all of the comments on the blog... I'm sorry for the delay in answering the question about the Fermented Bean Curd.. you can use either the spicy or regular fermented bean curd.

I love this recipe. I am going to try it this weekend. I plan on putting on top of coleslaw and stuffing it into dates which I am going to wrap in my smoked chipotle eggplant "bacon". Thank you for your great ideas.

Hi, Melody. I prepared this three days ago as directed, and left the two separate mixtures out to ripen a few days (lightly covered with a quality cheesecloth).

Thought you would be interested to know that the BLUE mixture (with the chlorella) developed spots of white mold all over the surface. I tasted the mold and it was innocuous, but I scraped it off. In my house, that mold is probably aspergillus oryzae (as in koji), floating around since I made soy sauce two years ago.

I've combined the two mixtures, and have frozen the bulk of it for later. The fresh balance will make it into a blue cheese type dressing, just as soon as I get the extra water out of my (home-made) tofu, to crumble and mix with your blue "cheese", and some lemon juice, vinegar, and herbs.

Hey, I have a question for you since you seem to know more about the mold--I got mold, too, except I had greyish mold on most surface parts. I threw those away...it was like a spiderwebby mold. The conditions were that I put it in a bowl, lightly covered with a paper towel, lots of air, but in a little cabinet type thing on the counter that was 70% closed. And I did not use the tofu; I used tempeh (which forced me to guess about the liquid I needed). I took off all the mold I think, but...will eating this make us sick? I REALLY did get all (visible?) mold off. And if you (or anyone) knows...what did I do wrong in this recipe? Everything else was to the letter.

@Chortle and Sigh.. I would not eat it. I would NEVER use tempeh to culture this because it is a much different bacteria than the fermented tofu. The same way you could not get tempeh to culture if you used acidophilus or fermented tofu as the culture, I'm pretty certain that using tempeh to culture cheese would produce a not very good and possibly dangerous end product. Note, I am not a food scientist and I don't have training in molds, so I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't eat it.

Thanks so much for replying! I will just toss the whole thing, then. My hands were tied and I had to use the tempeh. ''Twas a bummer. Next time I make this recipe, whenever that will be, I will have to INSIST on the correct ingredients.

I used Acidophilus probiotics and just emptied the capsules. I can't imagine where else you would get Acidophilus from, besides as a supplement. I also used chlorella in pill form and just crushed it with a mortar and pestel. I hope this turns out! Very excited, because I have a "stuffed dates" recipe from "Lust for leaf" cookbook, that I can't wait to make.

Oh, I see. Thanks! I'm not sure what I did wrong, but I have a big bowl of salty stuff. It's not very blue-cheesy :( Going to try again! How did you get that blue-cheesy texture? Should have not blended the mixtures smooth?

Have you ever tried using rejuvelac as your culture? It would add some liquid, so maybe you could leave out the liquid from the tofu. Also, I have a vegan yogurt starter that I got at the health food store. It is a powder and contains acidopholus, so I will likely use that, but I might try a batch with the rejuvelac also.

I was excited when I saw this recipe yesterday. We drove into San Francisco to Rainbow Market to get the more esoteric ingredients, some of which were available. I wish I had read the recipe more carefully first. I say this for benefit of others who might read this as there are a lot of those ingredients for which there are many options. The acidophilus culture alone offered in excess of a hundred, from capsules to liquids and all very expensive. The green algae was another where there were so many options (again, very expensive) that I was dazed. Then countless varieties of sauerkraut (organic, raw, jarred/pickled, etc.) THEN the fermented tofu which I will have to get at an Asian market. The miso alone, well, again, dozens of choices from mild white to dark, etc. Also, there are so many varieties of pumpkin seeds, including white, large green, roasted/salted. To be honest, while I am a pretty serious vegan cook and, I am going to try this, it's going to end up a very spendy experiment. You might want to just offer a little bit of guidance here. It would be helpful and appreciated. Thanks

Thanks for the note.. and I totally agree that I should explain this in the recipe. I will try to simplify this recipe a bit.. I actually created it while I was working as a chef in a health food restaurant, so I had access to all sorts of ingredients.. and talked about it on this blog for a while..and people asked me over and over to share the recipe, so I did.

Well, it's done. I just spooned it into some leftover raw cheese tins I had, lined with parchment. It is really surprisingly good and has not yet been refrigerated.

I used raw cashews and, as you didn't mention it, did NOT soak, rather used them as they were.

I got organic raw pumpkin seeds (at Rainbow in SF) that were a dark green and also used them as they were.

Finally found fermented bean curd....which the lady at the Asian market said was the right thing.

Used raw, organic sauerkraut (again from Rainbow), very pungent.

Used a brand of carrot based acidophilus, in capsule form which I just opened.

Used SUN brand chlorella in a 3gm packet.

Used Kyoto White miso.

Used Maldon sea salt to finish.

I pretty much went by your procedure though improvised with using the nuts raw. I think next time, and there will definitely be a next time, I will double the "light" part and use less of the "green/bleu" part, purely for aesthetics. The taste was really good, tangy, lots of texture and character. The Maldon salt, which doesn't melt like other salt, added an "up front finish" that I like. Going to serve this tomorrow with St. George Terroir G & T's. Thanks for sharing it. Have a great weekend!!!

The easiest way to get the acidophilus is to use a few spoons of vegan yogurt from the store. The sauerkraut also has live cultures including lactobacillus if it hasn't been cooked or pasteurized. Ditto for the fermented tofu. With all these ingredients this recipe is brimming with beneficial bacteria.

The BIG question is whether penicillium mold, which is what makes dairy blue cheese blue, will grow in a non-dairy medium. (The penicillium starter can be bought online through Amazon or cheesemaking supply shops.).